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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22933939">Not Exactly the Same</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister'>GretchenSinister</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Rise of the Guardians (2012)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Multi, Past Relationship(s), Polyamory, Sex Education</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 07:34:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,655</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22933939</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Original Prompt: "Jack spent 300 years pretty much with kids. And he died before certain issues began, a.k.a, roughly before puberty. Or so it seems to me.</p><p>So, even if I do love a horny!Jack, let’s assume doesn’t know about the birds and the bees.</p><p>Post movie, the Guardians realize that there are certain things Jack seriously has to be educated on. How, I don’t know. Maybe he asks why he’s never seen the stork delivering the babies. Maybe he comments how weird it is that Jamie and Cupcake are spending so much time together lately. However you prefer.</p><p>Just give me some innocent!Jack, with traumatized!embarassed Guardians trying to explain to him the facts of life.</p><p>Bonus if Sandy is the one who gets the point across the easiest."</p><p>I could not suspend my disbelief enough to credibly write Jack as having observed humanity for 300 years without having figured out a thing or two.</p><p>But–I can believe that he doesn’t know how things work for spirits.</p><p>So we have this fic: In which demisexual and demiromantic Jack gets a crash course explanation of the unique aspects of sexual relationships between spirits from four out of five estranged spouses. Sadly no bonus.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>E. Aster Bunnymund/Nicholas St. North/Pitch Black/Sanderson Mansnoozie/Toothiana</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>RotG Polyamory Fics</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Not Exactly the Same</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/19/2015.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jack was well aware of how things worked between humans. For one thing, you don’t observe people for three hundred years without finding out how they get more people. It just hadn’t really ever been a prevailing topic of interest.<br/><br/>For a while, Jack wondered if this had to do with the age he seemed to be frozen in, but listening to his own voice and comparing himself to other teenagers led him to conclude that he was probably of age for anyone his own age—that is, if he was his apparent age, and the other person was of a similar apparent age, which really wasn’t possible, unless of course some major magic were involved, and—<br/><br/>To say the least, it got complicated fast, and Jack still couldn’t really bring himself to care. He didn’t feel like he was missing out on anything, and whether that was just how he was or because he was an invisible spirit of winter wasn’t a question that preoccupied him.<br/><br/>He didn’t interact with other spirits for long enough to find out if being on more equal footing would have changed his mind in any way. Since he had no idea of his true place or purpose, he wouldn’t be equal to them anyway, and to be frank, he heard enough rumors to know that made any interaction at all dangerous.<br/><br/>But then he became a Guardian. He had a title and a purpose attached to his name, and this made him the equal of any spirit out there, and in terms of protocol and power, possibly superior to more than a few of them. And Tooth had been happy to hug him after he took the oath, and that didn’t even account for all the crushes of the little fairies, and, basically, to say the least, Jack was going to have to learn how spirits tended to approach romance and sex so he could turn anyone down without some sort of literally catastrophic faux pas.<br/><br/>It was no doubt a wise resolution. But then, well…there were just so many other fun and interesting things to do, that Jack completely forgot about it.<br/><br/>That is, he forgot about it until North asked for his help in planning a post-Christmas party for spirits.<br/><br/>He arrived a little earlier than North asked him to, because he wanted to ask North if there was any way to get invitations to spirits who might assume they weren’t invited, even if the party was really for everyone, but North was meeting with several yetis when he showed up.<br/><br/>“Do you think we have enough bedrooms?” North asked them. “Do you think it is <em>clear</em> that we have enough bedrooms? Clear enough that if there are some who ignore the bedrooms we will have just cause to ask them to leave?”<br/><br/>Uh-oh. “North! So, uh, I couldn’t help but overhear, and, well, are we having bedrooms at this party for the same kinds of things that humans would use bedrooms at a really long party for?”<br/><br/>North laughed. “Jack! Hello!” He winked at him. “Well, you know, not exactly the same, but the appearance can be pretty close, eh? As a spirit of fun you must—” he stopped when he noticed Jack’s alarmed expression. “Jack?”<br/><br/>“What do you mean by ‘not exactly the same’? And there’s no ‘must’ about anything I’ve done and—North, what kind of assumptions are the guests going to make? How—how do I politely stay out of those bedrooms at the party?”<br/><br/>“Only how to politely reject?” North asked. “Not how to politely accept?”<br/><br/>“North! I—I don’t <em>know</em> any other spirits, I hardly know the Guardians, and the ‘not exactly the same’ thing is really worrying me, actually. And I won’t be able to stay away from the party because it will be fun, a lot of fun—I literally don’t think I could manage to stay away—and won’t it just be asking for trouble for me to be afraid in the middle of the party?”<br/><br/>“Hmm…that is a fair point,” North said, “but—ah, well, you are you and you need explanation. How about we look at what I wanted to ask you about, and I will ask the other Guardians to come here, too. Maybe more than one explanation is needed, if you are not thinking of going ahead regardless.”<br/><br/>Jack hesitated only a moment before nodding. Yes, this would probably be embarrassing, but how else was he going to learn? Especially when it was something he had to know at once, and he wasn’t going to be able to be an invisible observer for.<br/><br/></p><hr/><p><br/><br/>“Okay,” Bunny said, settling against a wall in North’s workroom, “‘Not an emergency, but come right away,’ isn’t a signal that’s been used for a while, and I’m not surprised it isn’t being used for its original purpose, but what <em>are</em> we here for?”<br/><br/>Tooth and Sandy nodded, and they all looked toward North, who gestured to Jack.<br/><br/>“Uh, hi.” He gave them all a little wave. “So, I came over for party planning, and North made an offhand comment about…uh…intimate relationships between spirits being different from humans, and…that’s something I didn’t know and so I need an explanation and North said that I’d better have multiple explanations if I wasn’t just planning on learning by doing.”<br/><br/>“Why not learn by doing, though?” Bunny asked casually.<br/><br/>“Because I don’t want to have sex with strangers! And that’s what everyone at this party would be to me!”<br/><br/>“We’re not strangers,” Tooth said, then put her hand over her mouth as Jack’s face appeared to try to blush and turn pale at the same time. “That’s not what I—I mean, we’ll be at the party, and we won’t be strangers to you. That’s all. Which isn’t to say that we—I mean I—” Sandy tapped her arm to get her attention, the sand over his head showing her busily digging a hole. She pouted at him, but didn’t finish her previous sentence.<br/><br/>“Anyway,” said North, “we are going to do a group explanation then, we will keep things specific and to the point as much as possible. So.” He turned to Jack. “A big difference between spirits and humans is what I call centers, and what other spirits may call their element, or their domain, or something like that. We have our personalities, our bodies, our minds, our souls, and then, that thing that gives us our place in the world beyond the ordinary. This is sometimes very general, for minor spirits—they may just call it their magic, and it may be loosely tied to nature overall, this is common for the fey—but for anyone who is or was a god, or who was originally a human, it is usually very specific.”<br/><br/>“Or if it’s not specific, it’s still a strong overall influence,” Bunny interrupted. “Also, sometimes with gods, they’ve got a grab-bag of random things they’ve got domain over.”<br/><br/>“And it tends to be a major factor in choosing a new partner, especially for a party like this, when things can be fairly casual,” Tooth said. “In your case, Jack, that means that they know you’re the Guardian of Fun, or, more formally—and this is something we should talk about in general—Joy, as well as a winter spirit. Because of the first part, you are going to get a lot of spirits who would like to, ah, spend some time with you, and that think you’d probably also be interested.”<br/><br/>Jack nodded, definitely pale now.<br/><br/>“So,” North went on, “that is warning for you. But centers affect more than picking a partner. When Bunny says it is a strong overall influence, this means it affects sex and all other moments of intimacy. Very complimentary can be strange, like a doubling of the self, you need a strong self-image to really enjoy; this case and most others, is all good, nothing dangerous, mostly not noticeable to anyone around, even if lots of power involved. When centers of partners are opposites or very opposed, this can be dangerous for other people if the partners are not familiar with how powerful they are or if they are too infatuated to care about control, or, well…maybe not dangerous but maybe not very good to spread through a party.”<br/><br/>“Call it psychic overflow,” Tooth said. “It’s worse when the partners involved have centers that already involve the mind. Anyway, it can be a bit difficult to know exactly how your centers are going to interact. It depends a lot on emotional closeness, what you both feel about the sex itself, and the amount of power you have. Sometimes it’s really obvious, sometimes it’s a lot more human than you’d expect.”<br/><br/>“Since you’re a Guardian, and you probably don’t know the full extent of your powers yet, if you were going to have sex with a spirit now, your centers and powers would definitely obviously play into things,” Bunny said. “Look, Jack, as a Guardian you’re one of the most powerful spirits out there, now, and things might not happen like you expect. Okay. Crikey. So. Your body is all in your head, at this level. You look the way you do because you imagine yourself looking that way. For us, the belief of children affects that, too, but not so much when they’re not directly looking at you.”<br/><br/>“That’s…amazing and I kind of wish I’d learned it in a different context,” Jack said. “We’re all shapeshifters?”<br/><br/>“Yes, but it’s something you’ve got to plan ahead for because it takes concentration—” Bunny turned to Sandy and raised his eyebrows at the symbols flashing over his head. “Sandy says you’ll get better at it as you get older and he <em>is</em> telling the truth, but—come on, Sandy, that just raises a bunch of unrelated questions, I’m not translating that.” He looked back to Jack. “A good etiquette rule is to never ask someone to look different for you. Also, if you’re really…I don’t want to say in love, but—emotionally involved with your partner, you might lose track of your physical form—not that you disappear, but you’ll stop noticing what’s happening on that level. That’s also why you’ll get couples with apparently incompatible anatomy, and they’re just fine.”<br/><br/>“Speaking of anatomy,” North said seriously, “make sure that you are very clear in your mind about whether or not you want to get pregnant before you have sex, even if by human standards this would be impossible.”<br/><br/>“What.” Jack looked to the others—surely this, at least, had to be a joke. But no, they all nodded soberly. And if he asked if any of them had ever been pregnant, that might derail the conversation, and make it go on longer, and he really didn’t want that. “Okay. Sure. Do I have to mentally protect myself against STDs, too?”<br/><br/>“No, there’s nothing like a generally transmissible infection of any kind, among spirits,” Tooth said. “Is all this making sense? Is there anything else you want to know, specifically?”<br/><br/>“Um, well, what about romance? You’ve been talking about spirit sex and I don’t think that’s going to be an urgent issue for me, because, also, my main question to begin with was how to politely turn people down! So I’d like that answered, too.”<br/><br/>The others looked at each other a bit sheepishly. “We just want you to have the information in case you need it, Jack,” Tooth said. “Maybe you think you never will, but you’re in the midst of a lot of change in your life. A lot of other things could change, too.”<br/><br/>“And as for romance,” Bunny said, “there’s no advice to give, other than never, ever make assumptions. Always ask. Always talk. Some people are looking for a year and a day, some people are looking for a decade or a century, some people are looking for forever. Everyone wants different things.” Bunny folded his arms and fell silent, and Sandy reached up to place a small, comforting hand on his elbow.<br/><br/>Well, that seemed like something Bunny probably didn’t want Jack sticking his nose into. “Okay, so…I’ve got that. But since I can’t stop other beings from making assumptions, how do I say no, and say it clearly, without causing problems?”<br/><br/>“It might be easier just to give you list of beings to avoid,” North said, shaking his head. “Some people, you cannot <em>not</em> invite, and yet…”<br/><br/>Sandy raised his hand and the Guardian G appeared above his head.<br/><br/>“That’s right!” Tooth said. “Jack, it might all work out if you just emphasize your Guardian status. We’ve generally held ourselves apart from other spirits, at least in this way, so no one would be surprised.”<br/><br/>“Are you sure?” asked Bunny. “After what happened in the dark ages I know a lot of spirits that think we’re fair game.”<br/><br/>North quirked his eyebrows. “But as far as <em>I</em> know, they have been wrong. And besides…maybe they will think Jack has changed things.” The others nodded with more or less assurance.<br/><br/>“So. There’s your plan,” said Bunny. “If you aren’t getting your point across, say that you’re sorry, you can’t, you’re a Guardian.”<br/><br/>“Yes,” said North. “Is that good? Is that all?”<br/><br/>Jack had plenty of questions, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to bring them up among all the Guardians, so he nodded, and Sandy, Tooth, and Bunny left.<br/><br/>When they had gone, North sighed. “Any questions for only me to answer?”<br/><br/>Jack debated for a moment, then asked, “What happened in the dark ages?”<br/><br/>North chuckled. “That is not a question for only me to answer.” He lifted one of his hands to show Jack the ring on his thumb. “Here,” he said, taking it off and handing it to Jack. “You look, you decide what other questions you want to ask.”<br/><br/>Jack peered at it, at the shapes along the outside and the inside. Five symbols. Five letters. N, B, T, S, P. “Was—is—was this a wedding ring?” He couldn’t keep the shocked wonder from his voice.<br/><br/>“Bunny thinks I should not have kept it,” North said. “And maybe after what has happened—but Bunny is Guardian of Hope. He must understand, no matter what he says.”<br/><br/>Words formed in Jack’s memory. <em>…cast out…to long for a family…</em><br/><br/>“This is…not something I know what to say to,” Jack said. “He—he hurts, you know! He really does! And—”<br/><br/>North sighed again. “We know. We know he does not like to remember, we know he rarely feels wonder, or hope. We know he doesn’t dream. What we do not know is what to do, because we hurt, too, and his actions seem always to try and make it worse. We all hurt in ways that make the thought of healing more frightening than continuing on with a familiar pain.”<br/><br/>Jack is silent for a while. “Have I changed things?”<br/><br/>“Ach,” North said, taking the ring back. “It is far too soon to tell that. Anyway, we were just meeting to plan a party, yes?”<br/><br/></p><hr/><p><br/><br/>Jack spent a lot of the party perched where he could see all of it below him—the others had been right about the assumptions beings would make and it was easier to be literally above it all—and in the mix what he most noticed were the Guardians. Just months ago, at his failed initiation, the discomfort between them had been palpable. Now, they all circled back to each other, again, and again, and again. Maybe he had changed something. Maybe he wanted to be part of that change, as long as it was slow. Maybe he was part of a change that could fix something broken.<br/><br/>Even if the idea of Sandy shapeshifting kind of terrified him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Comments from Tumblr:</p><p>bowlingforgerbils said: I just love the OT+ AU, and I love when you use it to fill a prompt. :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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